Transcript of Romanticism

INDULGING in one’s emotional stateThe Early RomanticsOutspoken, energetic, tough-minded. Sought to scrutinize the everyday; find meaning in the common. The Late Romantics“Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” his life was the stuff of legend.Tree Huggers.The Gothic.Doomed questCursed wandererMedieval haunted castlesSolitary outcastSupernatural eventsEvil villainColeridge’s "Ancient Mariner" is an example, so is anything by Poe.The Byronic Hero: a defiant and satiric take on a villain, sort of an anti-hero.Intense Emotions.Transcendentalism.They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each person find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3). RomanticismThe

Flowering

of

Romanticism

1798—1832What's it all about?It stemmed from a psychological desire to escape from reality. (Who can't relate to that?)Drama. So much drama. It hits you right in the feels.Elements of Romanticism

Recognition and appreciation of beauty & the sublime or truly awesome.

AWESOME: Inspiring awe, reverence, fear, appreciation.

The sublime often involves fear, danger, and terror, but is beautiful anyway…or because of those qualities.

Adoration of NATURE and all of its creative and destructive forces.

Emphasis on intuition, instinct, and feeling.

The individual's capacity for imagination is divine.

Sensitive, gentle, physically weak (prone to sickness, thus a user of opium). Interested in the supernatural. William WordsworthSamuel Taylor ColeridgeLord Byron (George Gordon)John KeatsPlaced emphasis on the sensual (synaesthesia) “Beauty is truth and truth, beauty.”Fascination with the natural world unified by a greater amoral force.Percy Bysshe ShelleyHis wife, Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein. Nature was regarded as an organically unified whole. It’s all connected, man!nature as a healing powernature as a source of subject and imagenature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization--including artificial languageRomanticism displaced the rationalist view of the universe as a machine with the analogy of an "organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. COMMON "GOTHIC" ELEMENTS OF ROMANTIC WORKS: Romantics EmbracedWhy save the drama for your mama when you can put it into a poem?Wordsworth defined all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" This guy.Emphasis on the individual and emotion marks a turning point in literary history. Literary ThingsThe writers of the previous enlightenment years were known as neoclassicists and their poetry was impersonal, logical, rigid. The romantics disagreed with their approach to poetry.

Romantics were quite serious about their feelings. Almost self-centered about them.

"I wandered lonely

as a cloud..."individualism!CREATIVITYIMAGINATIONTHE SUBLIMEintuitionIt is difficult to pinpoint the exact start of the Romantic movement....can be traced to many events of the time: arguably the largest artistic movement of the late 1700s.

Its influence was felt across continents and through every artistic discipline into the mid-nineteenth century

many of its values and beliefs can still be seen in contemporary poetryTHE GERMANSGerman romantic poets included Fredrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe--(this is where most people think Romanticism originated).THE BRITSBritish poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Lord Byron, and John Keats propelled the English Romantic movement. THE YANKSRomanticism crossed the Atlantic through the work of American writers and thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson and poets like Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Ich ben ein Romantiker!In Xanadu...a host of golden daffodils...I shot the albatrosssociety and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupt the purity of the individual. Sought this connection to the "over-soul" through nature.Self-Reliance.Creativity is divine.This movement allowed poetry became the emotional, personal, meditative kind of poetry that we’re most familiar with today. stereotype.a surge of interest in folklore in the mid- to late-eighteenth century (the brothers Grimm)reactions against neoclassicism and the boring, rigid Augustan poets in Englandpolitical events and uprisings fostered nationalistic pride all over the placeTHE MOVEMENTROMANCE?Now, art was not just valuable not as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero concept.This led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry like never before, where the "poetic speaker" became a more the direct persona of the poet. ME!(sometimes accurate)THE BRITSThe British Romantics revered nature and this reverence carried over to American Romanticism as well...it just changed a bit.Emerson was affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist church. This is Thoreau, not Emerson. Thoreau went to live in a cabin in the woodsand had people bring him blueberry pies. He told the world to "simplify, simplify, simplify!"(Present in both British and American Romanticism) It's eerie and mystical.

He is solitary and contemplative and on top of a weird, foggy mountain.